Our good friends at the NSA had a booth at the RSA Conference, and the highlight for me was the opportunity to see, touch, and play with the Enigma machine. It was the same machine the Nazis used for code creating and breaking during WWII. The U.S. broke the Enigma code, but the Nazis never realized we had. Our ability to decode their Enigma-written messages helped shorten the war considerably.

I had seen these machines before, but I never knew how they actually worked. So I asked one of the NSA staffers if he could demo the machine while I videotaped it, but he told me he couldn’t be on camera. Since I don’t work for the NSA, I can be on camera. After he showed me how it worked, I shot a demo.

The Enigma machine had a series of relays of which at each point the letter that you selected could be changed to any other of the other 26 letters in the alphabet. In total, a single press of a key stroke could change that letter between seven to nine times. But the rotors on the Enigma kept shifting, so if I pressed the same key twice, it would deliver a completely different result. Watch the video to see how it worked.